On Hair and Hamlet

At the beginning of May, I got my hair cut short for the second time in my life.

Since a woman who says she has short hair might mean anything from a bob to buzz-cut, let me be clear: my hair used to be a few inches longer than shoulder-length (if you’re picturing Weird Al Yankovic, you’re close.) It’s now as short as that of many short-haired men I know, what is often called a pixie cut.

Many of my friends here in Toronto have known me since elementary school, high school, or undergrad, when I wore a similar hairstyle. They tended to be surprised that I cut my hair right now this week without mentioning it but were otherwise unfazed. Others who’ve only ever known me with long hair — friends I met during grad school — asked me what made me decide to change my hairstyle so drastically.

I found this question tough to answer, usually skirting around it by enlisting one of the aforementioned high-school or undergrad buddies to testify that I had, in fact, had short hair for most of my life and it was really those five years of long hair that was the outlier period.  But thinking about it, the reason I find pinpointing the cause of my decision so difficult is because actually, it’s about why I chose to grow my hair long back around 2004.

When I was in grade one, I decided to get my hair cut short like a boy’s. Dad wasn’t thrilled, but I think he probably cared less about it than about the time Mom let us get a hamster when he was away on a business trip. (My sister, on the other hand, will likely complain in the comments that by making this choice, I forced her to copy me and get the mushroom cut she hates to see in old photos. Lies, Debra.)

I often felt hyper-aware of the way the rest of the world reacted to my outside-gender-norms haircut. I remember other kids and authority figures mistaking me for a boy, sometimes not believing me when I explained otherwise. I got all sorts of weird and downright offended looks, or sometimes hostile accusations, in women-only spaces like public washrooms. Once I hit puberty, I found myself constantly having to negotiate two identity challenges: first making it clear to people that I was not male, and then that I did not consider myself to be, as many automatically assumed, lesbian.

I suppose my eventual aesthetic capitulation didn’t have to come in the form of growing my hair out. I could’ve pierced my ears or started wearing make-up. I could’ve changed the style of clothing I chose (until undergrad, a lot of my clothes were hand-me-downs from my older male cousins, and at first, I was happy to stick with the baggy T-shirts, cargoes, and hoodies in which I felt comfortable). But long hair seemed to me to be the easiest and most obvious way of signalling to people, “Hello, yes, I’m a woman, please stop glaring!” So that’s what I chose.

At first, I thought the only reason I didn’t feel comfortable with long hair was because I’d missed all the youthful experiences of how to deal with it. I never learned how to comb or style it properly; how to keep a ponytail from falling out; or how to put it up in a bun. And I figured having to take doubly-long showers and clean out the drain afterwards was just something women had to put up with, like finding strands in your food or getting all sweaty down the back of your neck in the summer.

But finally, this spring, I realized: no. Long hair is great, but it’s not who I feel like I am. And the reason it’s not who I feel like I am is precisely because it’s linked to a kind of femininity with which I simply don’t identify.

For clarity: although I believe that transgendered persons are normal, cool human beings, I am not, nor have I considered myself to be, one of these individuals. I’m a woman, and I was a girl, and that was and is jim-dandy. What I am talking about is embracing a lot of behaviours, social interactions, and ideas typically considered in Western culture to be “for boys,” and, faced with the kind of categorization where I could choose either to abandon these things that “weren’t for girls” or to incorporate a sense of being a boy alongside that of being a girl so that these things were still “for me,” I chose the latter.

My friends in kindergarten were mainly boys, and so were a lot of the friends with whom I ate lunch in high school. I had one Cabbage Patch doll but a whole battallion of Ninja Turtle and superhero action figures. When I was five, my pretend fantasy-character identity was an (sigh) angel-boy named “Jack Female* Bear”, and when I was seven, I decided I liked the name “Michael” better than “Sarah,” at least for filling in This-Book-Belongs-To blanks.

All the protagonists of the stories I wrote were boys, and so were all the characters I wanted to play in Shakespeare or Stoppard. I picked toy guns, swords, and bows and arrows when offered my choice at the dollar store; and I have always, always hated wearing dresses, skirts, make-up, or anything pink and frilly.

But maybe most telling of all is the pronoun I use — and have always used, to the best of my memory — on the rare occasions when I think of myself in the third-person: he. Again, not because I consider myself to be male; I  started doing this because when I do think of myself in the third-person, I’m imagining what an onlooker would think of me, and even at a young age I was aware that most strangers thought I was a boy. But, until very recently, the thought of thinking of myself as “she” made me cringe. And although I couldn’t speak to why I felt that way as a little kid, I’m better able to put my finger on it as an adult.

Because I am and always have been an avid reader, and she “got out her house-wife, and sewed the shadow onto Peter’s foot”; she “was still looking eagerly into Edmund’s pale face and wondering if the cordial would have any result”; and she “was shrinking against the wall opposite, looking as if she was about to faint.”

He, on the other hand, “flew round the room, taking the mantlepiece on the way,” “had the sense to bring his sword smashing down on her wand instead of trying to go for her directly,” “took a great running jump and managed to fasten his arms around the troll’s neck from behind.” He “drew the dog-whip from swiftly from the dead man’s lap, and throwing the noose round the reptile’s neck he drew it from its horrid perch.” He shoots, he scores!

It’s not that I’m not familiar with or don’t appreciate the exceptions. But for every Pippi Longstocking, there’s a dozen Peter Pans; every Alanna of Trebond and Katniss Everdeen have to face the memory of hundreds of King Peter the Magnificents and fight off the shadow of even more Queen Lucy the Softy Wimps; and when fictional genius detectives get together for their annual conference, it’s such a sausage fest that Temperance Brennan probably stays home.

And I swear I’m close to wrapping up, so if you haven’t given up with tl;dr yet, you’re on the home stretch, but you may have noticed a few paragraphs back that I snuck in an “until recently.”

What happened recently to change my attitude toward “she” was that my friend Liz opened the inaugural season of Socratic Theatre with a cross-gendered version of Hamlet, in which I played Guildenstern and others. Characters like Hamlet and Claudius, who are traditionally male character played by male actors, were female characters played by actresses; similarly, Ophelia and Gertrude both became male characters played by men, and many of the gender-specific pronouns and titles in the text were changed to reflect the new casting.

I’ve always loved theatre, and I’ve had a great time in every play I’ve ever been in, even the ones full of disasters and arguments, but there was something so powerful and so different about being in a classic show… where the stars were all women. Where, unusually, it was the guys who were drastically outnumbered backstage — who had to worry about where they were going to change costume. Where both the real voices of authority and the voices of the fictional characters who shaped the play belonged to women.

And even though at first it was weird to hear things like, “Princess Hamlet” or “The gentleman protests too much, methinks,” and it was tough wrapping my head around changes in pronouns and gender-specific words like “king” or “uncle,” you know what? After I got used to it, it was seamless. It was still a great story, performed by gifted people, moving attentive audiences.

That this is in no small part due to the vision, creativity, and extraordinary commitment of Liz and the talent and dedication of the rest of the cast and crew, I have no doubt. I was grateful to have had a part in it. But I’m even more grateful for what the show did for me as an artist.

At the cast party, with some fellow Trekkie actors, I started joking about a cross-gender version of Star Trek: the Next Generation. At first, it was funny, but then I thought, Why not? It would be fun to have a shot at playing Data or Worf for once; fun for some male castmates to have a chance to play Crusher or Troi. Yeah, I suddenly understood, an appealing, powerful character like Picard could be a woman–not just a woman playing a man, but a woman playing a woman who  happened to have the personality and competence of Captain Jean-Luc Picard–and that would be amazing.

From there, it was a short step to wanting to cross-gender cast more stories. Episodes of House, of The X Files, of pretty much everything I’ve ever watched. Whenever I brought up the idea, friends suggested new ones, often bursting with characters of the opposite gender they’d love to play–what about Friends? Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? The Golden Girls?

I still think it would be lots of fun to film an existing episode from any of these shows with actresses playing the male characters as women and vice versa. And maybe someday when I have time and money and, you know, actual video equipment, I’ll do it. But for now, the take-home application is to my writing.

Because my knee-jerk response is to build stories like the ones I found exciting as a kid, worlds with boy warriors and wise old wizards and cackling Dark Lords, worlds where even having a 2:1 male to female ratio unconsciously makes me feel like there are too many gals. But when I look at stories through the critical and emotional stance I found in Hamlet, Princess of Denmark, suddenly I see that I can have girl swordfighters, wise old witches, and sneering Dread Ladies. And an homme fatale. Or a den father. And I can have these things in an exciting, intriguing narrative, one that doesn’t immediately make me wonder, hey, where are all the dudes at? It’s like jumping into a swimming pool: once I’m over the initial shock, wow,  this is kind of awesome!

And maybe, if I’m lucky and work hard, the next girl or boy like me, who has short hair or who likes pink; who dreams of being a knight or a Stanley Cup winner or a nurse or a figure skater; who wants to yell or scream or weep without getting called a bitch or a tomboy or a sissy or a wuss; who’s looking for something to read that speaks to who she or he is and wants to be — maybe those kids will be able to find books where she “had close-cropped hair the colour of dried blood and long, mad-scientist fingers,” and he “cried when I flushed Goldie the goldfish down the toilet in grade five,” and she “pulled a flash of orange from her own pocket and launched herself after.”

Because, to me, that is the essential normative power of writing fiction. To change ideas. To set up a new understanding of what’s normal. To make something as trivial as a haircut (or skin colour, or sexual orientation) just that — trivial, instead of drastically changing the way people react to the person who owns it.

All it can take is a story.

* Yeah, okay, I wasn’t so great with the whole “word meanings” thing as a kid.